Today's business processes are too complex to model. A business process usually involves the participation of multiple roles/entities, including human, systems, external entities, and so on, with complex interactions among the roles/entities, usually in the form of information exchange. An integrated picture of a complex business process is very important for both communication and analysis purpose. However, it is very hard to obtain such an integrated picture in practice, because no single person has a global knowledge on the whole business operation from a macroscopic view to a microscopic view, and in fact every role involved in a business process only knows their own parts of the business relatively clearly. Thus, it is hard to collect these pieces of fragment information together to generate a complete business process diagram. At the same time, when collecting these pieces of fragmentary information, preserving consistency among them and managing various changes are also very difficult. While the scale of the business process increases, the difficulty to capture and represent it soars significantly. So how to effectively capture complex business processes in an integrated way is a very critical and indispensable part of today's enterprise business process reengineering, business process automation, and system integration.
Current Business Process Modeling Tools comprise UML activity diagram; Microsoft Visio, iGrafx FlowCharter, SmartDraw; and WBI Modeler, and so on. All of the available business process modeling methods/tools are either focused on modeling simple flow charts only, or designed with an assumption that all critical people participating the business process can come together to complete the integrated business process modeling. However, the problem lies in that usually it isn't realistic to gather all the involved people together from different departments or different working sites of an enterprise.
Thus, the business process can only be captured manually and recorded on a piece of paper. Business consultants can interview people at different levels of position to gather fragment information on different levels. For example, CxO-level people are interviewed to get overall information on a certain business process and low-level people are interviewed to get the details of a certain local part in the business process. The consultants can record these pieces of information on a piece of paper, or they can also utilize the above mentioned business process modeling tools, and take the interview results home to process, and finally generate a comprehensive description of a customer's business process. The consultants can also confirm this description with customer.
In the above business requirement gathering cycle, the information obtained from different people is often mismatched. It is difficult to put these fragments together because of the lack of an interface agreement among them. The key reason is the lack of a systematic approach and effective supporting tools in the whole cycle.
A method and system for process brokering and contents aggregation in collaborative business process management are disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication U.S. 2003/0187743 A1, wherein Process Brokering Services (PBS) are implemented through the concept of Adaptive Documents to facilitate e-commerce. In the U.S. Patent Application, a flow chart is plotted for each role, respectively. However, when an interaction between a role and another role is involved in plotting a flow chart, the behaviors of the two roles have to be involved simultaneously. Therefore, the behavior of a role cannot be described separately, which is disadvantageous to the simplification of the modeling procedure. Especially in the case of being unable to collect the two roles together, it is hard to preserve consistency in the information obtained from them.
A system and a method for enterprise workflow resource management are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,308,163, wherein the relations among respective roles are described macroscopically, however, the flow chart for each individual cannot be given, thereby the associations between respective messages and specific behaviors of respective individuals cannot be given, and the associations between respective behaviors of an individual and specific behaviors of other individuals cannot be given, either. Thus, this approach is not suitable for modeling complex systems.